Question

Our Dell PowerEdge 2600 has a flashing orange caution light on status light and on 1 drive

Asked by: swiftny

Our Dell PowerEdge 2600 has a flashing orange caution light as well as a flashing orange light on one of the three drives.  Before I jump to conclusions... what does this mean?   If I need to replace the drive, how do I go about doing it?

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Asked On
2007-03-13 at 08:26:30ID22446255
Tags

dell

,

poweredge

,

2600

,

light

,

orange

Topic

Computer Servers

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
3

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Answers

 

by: dbacks1000Posted on 2007-03-13 at 09:35:59ID: 18711765

If the online indicator is still on, this is a predicted failure.  If the online indicator is off, the hard drive has failed.  Most of the time these are failed drives from my experience.  The following Dell link explain this.
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/pe6400/en/sm/beep.htm

If the server is running and the hard drive has failed, you must have RAID configured in the server.  It never hurts to double check your configuration though.  If you have three drives in the server you probably have a RAID 5 set, but you can check this in a couple of ways.

1) Open Dell Open Manage Server Administrator and check your RAID configuration.
2) (Not as reliable) Check the size of you drives that you have avaible to your server compared to the size of your hard drives.  For instance, if you have three 72 GB drives and have 144 GB (approx) available to the server, you have a RAID 5 set.  If you have about 210 GB you have a RAID 0 set (no RAID at all!), ect...

Once you know you have a RAID 5 or RAID 1 set you can simply pull the drive and put in a new drive on the fly.  The server will begin rebuilding automatically.  Remember, you are in a vunerable state with one failed drive, so back up your server before you pull the drive just in case.  You should also make sure you have a good backup now.  If you loose another drive you loose all you data.

Hope this helps.
Mike

 

by: swiftnyPosted on 2007-03-13 at 09:58:28ID: 18711961

Thank you, It's definitely RAID 5... I'll buy a drive and swap it out.

 

by: fnillcPosted on 2008-10-29 at 15:37:29ID: 22836485

I'd just like to clarify (kind of a nitpick point) that a RAID-0 array is in fact still considered RAID. It's just using the entire available capacity of all disks and striping the data across the disks. This provides improved performance, but no redundancy.  Because RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, and RAID-0 provides no redundancy, it's not really a redundant array. So a more appropriate name might be AID (Array of Independent Disks) or SAID (Striped Array of Independent Disks).

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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